Saâdane Afif
GALERIE MICHEL REIN
42, rue de Turenne
October 22–November 28
Saâdane Afif, Vice de Forme: In Search of Melodies, 2009, mixed media. Installation view.
To advertise the climactic event of Vice de Forme: In Search of Melodies, 2009—a sculptural, linguistic, and musical evolution—French artist Saâdane Afif created a graphic poster, an editioned work in its own right, with graphic designer deValence for display at the gallery and at FIAC. White and pink lettering announced composer-pianist Louis-Philippe Scoufras’s performance of a list of songs, including "Screw You!" and "Lovesong." The background graphics featured three black forms: a rectangle, a square, and a circle, an allusion to the sculpture that was the starting point of Afif’s project.
An alleged reference to a 1974 cartoon of a nuclear power plant by French cartoonist Jean-Marc Reiser and to Man Ray’s Presse Papier ŕ Priape (Priapus Paperweight), 1920, a marble desk accessory in homage to the Greek god of fertility and especially male virility, Afif’s brushed-chrome sculpture realized a cylinder, sphere, and cube atop a circular disk. Presenting the original materialization of the sculpture––slightly smaller, and in marble––to twelve people (artists, writers, and musicians, including Olivier Babin and Judicael Lavrador), Afif asked each to respond to the object by writing the lyrics to a song. Then, with Scoufras, Afif composed a musical score for each mini-libretto over the course of twelve months.
On opening night, the melodies inspired by Afif’s collaborators’ words (and by his sculpture) were presented for the first time. Scoufras played an upright piano, looking at only the lyrics to each of the twelve songs. He did not have a single musical note as a cue for his nearly one-hour recital. Instead, each of the twelve pages of text was scribbled with comments in green and red ink, reminders like PUT SOME SOUL!
For the remainder of the exhibition, a player piano, like Afif’s chrome sculpture, is plugged into an electric outlet. The sculpture rotates smoothly, both following and conducting the loop of songs recorded directly from Scoufras’s opening-night concert. Melody rises from the words inspired by Afif’s simple structure, an object that was itself built on appropriated images and histories.
— Lillian Davies
“The New Festival”
CENTRE POMPIDOU
Place Georges-Pompidou
October 21–November 23
Elmgreen & Dragset, Drama Queens, 2009. Performance view.
Call it what you will (a stage, an event, a platform?), but curator Bernard Blisténe’s performance-based program at the Pompidou may prove to be nothing less than a major triumph for the museum. Belying its straightforward title, “The New Festival” will gather works by 160 artists during five weeks in a program that escapes any precise definition and recalls the museum’s experimental beginnings in the late 1970s. Certain days offer up to ten events––from dance and lectures to music and films––alongside two related exhibitions, one at the Pompidou and the other at the Conciergerie, a former royal palace and prison.
The highlight of the festival’s opening weekend was undoubtedly Andrea Fraser’s Official Welcome, a parody of thank-you speeches from imagined art-award ceremonies that debuted in 2001 and retains its bite. Proceeding to undress as the performance became more ambiguous, Fraser commanded the attention of visitors in the museum, as well as those outside, who tapped on the glass of the gallery, snapped photos, and thereby underscored the efficacy of her work. That night, Elmgreen & Dragset’s Drama Queens, 2009, also pushed limits between the subject and the object of performance. With a libretto by Tim Etchells, the soap-opera-esque play (one could taste the melodrama) features an anthropomorphic group of sculptures––by Koons, Giacometti, Arp, Hepworth, Rückriem, Warhol, and LeWitt.
Of the standouts at the museum’s exhibition, Ben Kinmont’s On Becoming Something Else, 2009, is a multipart project comprising a selection of essays by the art critic and noted anarchist Félix Fénéon on gastrology, as well as meals that Kinmont organized at seven different restaurants, based on short biographies he wrote about seven artists whose “art practices,” like his own, “led them out of the art world and into a new value structure.” Also of note is the program La Peinture Parlée (Paintings Speak), featuring Heimo Zobernig’s large cage housing thirty paintings, each chosen by an artist, critic, or curator. At 2 PM each day, one of the works will be removed from the confines and left on view with a contextualizing statement by the individual who selected it. Blisténe has even incorporated the Pompidou’s vast piazza into his project; here, visitors can find the festival’s calendar outlined in crisp white text, as if it could be easily contained or classified.
A related exhibition at the Conciergerie is on view until December 12.